~ firearms and fermentation

Monthly Archives: October 2012

So I’m constantly told the AR-15 is well liked by many because it is the grown man’s Barbie Doll of firearms. However if you are going to customize the gun, wouldn’t a chainsaw be the ultimate in bayonet additions? I mean we all cannot be Ash Williams from The Evil Dead, Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness and have a chainsaw hand so a chainsaw bayonet makes complete sense to any Zombie or Horror movie fan.

I think if one added a silencer to the AR-15 along with a chainsaw bayonet, they would have the perfect tool for fighting the undead or perhaps for cutting firewood. 😉

A few days ago I posted on what to do with some red wine which had seen better days and called the post “Long in the tooth.” Well I am happy to report that ginger ale and red wine is a nice little libation. In fact if you added some additional sweetener, which I did not, you might end up with something close to grape Nehi.

I didn’t get exotic with it and add fruit, it was simply about a half and half blend of ginger ale and wine which had seen better days. In fairness the wine was becoming tart and just wasn’t my cup-of-tea. It could have been outstanding for the grape varietal, I don’t get too bogged down in all that jazz, I simply try to drink what I like. In this case pouring dollars down the drain just didn’t seem prudent so I mixed it up a bit.

Go ahead and give it a whirl, what do you have to lose, a can of ginger ale and the few seconds it took mix it up. I will say if you want more wine flavor add more wine, if you want it sweeter with more carbonation, more ginger ale. Cheers!

Recently we seem to have homebrew competitions appearing out of the woodwork and sadly most don’t have a clue what they are doing and how one should be run. The first thing you have to do is figure out if the beer is a best beer type competition where a group or a crowd is going to decide a favorite or if a table of judges will make that decision based on guidelines. Best beer is a cinch to do, all you need is cups and some method for those sampling to vote. It generally is not a great way to find the absolute best beers, but works well and everyone is happy. The latter is much more work and takes more preparation.

So let’s say you decide to have judges, now you need to have guidelines so you might as well register the competition with the BJCP instead of reinventing the wheel. Then take the Competition Handbook and read it cover to cover. Now that you have that under your belt let’s talk specifics. You’ll need to determine the maximum number of entries you are going to have and whether or not you are going to return score sheets. It you are returning score sheets then allow ~12 minutes per judging of each beer in a two judge panel. Yep, about four beers per hour. So if you want to have 100 entries it would take two judges 25 hours to complete the judging. So let’s bump it to 10 judges and and have the five teams judge at the same time. Now we only have about five hours of judging to accomplish. A good rule of thumb is about 10-15 beers on a flgiht at one time so for our hypothetical situation of 10 judges and 100 beers we would try to do a 2.5 hour flight of 10 beers and then a break and then another 2.5 hour flight of 10 beers.

There are ways to speed up that process. One would be to not fill out full score sheets and to use the ones in the AHA final round. Those are “tick” sheets and take about 5 minutes or so to complete. Doing this you easily cut the time required by 60%. An even faster method would be to not provide any feedback and to judge to style as the best. The judges could agree on a score for each entry and then simply take the highest in the flight as the winner.

Personally I could figure out a way to make a modest 100-150 competition go with ease. Once you go above 200 entries the complexity can be especially challenging. We once hosted the South Region for the AHA and 583 entries nearly broke up in half. We ended up judging in two cities over 5 days to get it done. When you break off more than you can chew it really can cause some heartache. There are a million ways to skin a cat, but just be sure you know what you are doing before you take on a competition.

Noticed a post this morning where a person indicated his elderly grandmother has arthritis and is having difficulty racking the slide on here semi-automatic pistol and so he was trying to replace it with one which required less strength to operate the slide. I have to believe this is the perfect opportunity to get Granny a revolver. It should be much easier for her to handle and manipulate and if the revolver is from a manufacturer with a good reputation should last her for the rest of her life without ever having an issue.

It would not take much training at all for someone who is familiar with a semi-automatic to understand the operation of a revolver. If it were me I’d be looking for a fairly lightweight .357 magnum or .38 special with at least a 3″ barrel. Since she probably isn’t going to be concealing I would go for a pistol with a hammer in double-action with the ability to be fired single-action.

Whatever he chooses as a replacement for his grandmother it should be something she can used with ease should a situation happen.

Sometimes it is sad to see just how little certain people understand about firearms. This blog is not about politics, so I’ll tread as gingerly as possible, but some things were said during the Presidential debate last night which demonstrated ignorance.

Some statements were made about automatic weapons and nobody really got it right. You can legally own and obtain automatic weapons, but the hoops you will have to jump through are many and the wait time is long. If criminals have automatic weapons they were procured illegally and no amount of legislation will stop that from happening.

Now AK-47s were brought up and statements made that they belong in the hands of soldiers. Certainly not US soldiers, it’s a freakin Soviet made firearm! I’m not sure how someone mistakes an AK-47 not made in the US for a M-4 or a M-16 carried by the US troops. Many enthusiasts have purchased AR-15s which are semi-automatic and not made to function fully automatic or as machine guns.

What was disturbing was the statement:

Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced.

To ban firearms which are being used for hunting and sport because some have used them for crime is asinine. Do we regulate every item ever used in a crime or ban it, certainly not. If someone uses a Ginsu knive in a crime because they saw the infomercial and know it slices and dices should we ban all Ginsu knives? How about when someone crowns someone else king with a lamp, should lamps be banned? If I remember correctly both Russel Crowe and Naomi Campbell have used phones in assaults, perhaps phones should be banned. Some guy overseas threw a shoe, actually both shoes, at President Bush, yep, let’s ban shoes. Might as well get rid of baseball since someone has certainly used a bat for crime.

I don’t know why people, especially politicians, fear guns or at least use guns to create an aura of fear. Both candidates said it best last night, we have laws on the books, enforce those laws. We don’t need more laws, criminals do not care about laws. The only people new laws affect are law-abiding citizens.

Now that I have that off my chest I think I’ll go buy a lower before some politician and his cronies tells me I cannot.

Opened a bottle of wine last night that just wasn’t up to snuff. It wasn’t corked, but it was tart and yeasty. As it breathed it became better, but still not good enough to be enjoyable. This happens on occasion and I got to thinking this morning is there some way to salvage the bottle or should it become drain cleaner?

I guess one way would be to cook with it. I do that on occasion, but generally if it ain’t worth drinking it might not be what you should cook with. Another thought was to add some fruits and make Sangria. I don’t think the yeasty character would be hidden in traditional Sangria, so probably best to take another approach. On the other hand I do have some ginger ale and that probably would mask that character, especially when mixed with a bit of sugar and some citrus fruits.

So I guess a Sangria with less than stellar wine and ginger ale is in my future or the rest of the bottle of wine will get a tour of the city as it cleans the drain!

I noticed a recent forum post where someone was asking what corrosive ammo meant and thought it might be a good topic for a blog entry. Many people use surplus military ammo and some of it is corrosive. The primer is really the difference and the corrosive compounds are potassium chlorate, or sodium petrochlorate. When the cartridge is fired and the primer is ignited these compounds decompose into potassium chloride or sodium chloride. Now this will not immediately corrode your firearm, but can cause rust if left uncleaned.

So what to do, not buy the ammo? Nahh, the regime is either to wash and dry the parts and then clean and relube, or to use an ammonia based cleaner, dry, clean and relube. An easy to find ammonia based cleaner is window cleaner, yep, Windex. Spray, wipe and allow to dry and then clean as normal.

No need to be afraid of corrosive ammo, but if your practice is to only clean your firearms every third Saturday of a full moon, you may want to skip it. When using this type of ammo you should be cleaning after every trip to the range.

Here’s a couple of additional articles on the topic of surplus ammo with corrosive primers:

I was checking out the GABF winners and noticed NC brewers were awarded four medals. NC generally is not well represented at the festival although the program for this year lists 16 NC breweries in attendance. Maybe one day we can send them all to the festival and get a truck to bring back the medals. 😉

Congratulations to our winners and for bringing some hardware back to the Old North State!

A few weeks ago with some time to kill I went into a local bottle shop to see what stood out at me on the shelves. Somewhere along the way I came across a Flying Dog Pearl Necklace Oyster Stout and could not recall having that beer before so I picked up a sixer. As it turns out this was a magnificent find. The beer was first released in 2011 and is brewed with local oysters. I guess a disclaimer is in order that if you have allergies to shellfish you should probably avoid trying this beer. Other than that you should run out and get some while you can.

Their website indicates this is now a year-round beer and proceeds go to benefit Oyster Recovery Partnership. I really did not expect this beer to be as tasty as it is and know the next time I see it another sixer is going to jump into my shopping cart. Get some if you can, want some if you cannot. 😉

Just a few issues back Guns & Ammo featured the Heizer Double Tap. Essentially it is a palm sized pistol to use as a last resort. It has two barrels in an over-and-under combination and both fire at the same time. I guess I would think of it as a single (double) shot since to reload you would have to put in more rounds by hand. In case you may not be familiar with the pistol, here is a photo.

I think it is an odd and somehow neat looking pistol, but the price of admission was in the $400+ ballpark and I’d rather have a Ruger LCP which is similar in size and allows multiple shots. The LCP is brutal to shoot for more than a few rounds and I suspect this palm-sized .45ACP was no fun at all.

Now you may be asking why am I writing about a firearm I have never even seen in person? Great question, yesterday the inventor of the Double Tap sent out a letter to customers that production had been suspended and the relationship with Heizer has been severed.

I first saw the Double Tap on the show Person Of Interest when the character Root was kidnapping Finch to try to gain access to The Machine.

I thought it was interesting, and then the Guns & Ammo article published. I’m not sure the Double Tap has a place other than a backup pistol, but it might be a great choice for that type of service. At 12 to 14 ounces it is light enough to conceal easily and not be a burden. It will be interesting to see what happens with this design. Maybe someone can take it and make the action fire the top barrel and then on a second trigger pull the lower barrel like many Over-and-Under shotguns. then we’d have two shots, of course calling it a double tap wouldn’t quite work anymore. 😉